Autos vs Manual transmissions

I wonder how much Ward’s Wrecker Service charged our company for towing a truck several hundred miles to swap out an auto truck with a bad starter yesterday? I seriously doubt the starter went bad, but with today’s mechanically inept drivers who don’t carry a hammer to hit it and get the bendix to engage, you face a probably $6-800 round trip tow. Of course, a nice sturdy piece of rope pulling my manual truck or a nice slight downhill would have got me up and running

 

Pistons break and rods fall out. We all need tesla trucks.

 

How much power does it take to drive 500 miles?
How much extra money will you be charged in lieu of fuel tax?
How much are new batteries and will they be sole sourced from Telsa (#### right they will).

In my experience, every time someone figures a way to save money, someone else figures a way to stop you from realizing the savings. Satellite TV.....ground source heating.....bio-diesel....minimum income tax.....emissions regulations designed to decrease fuel economy and drive up fuel tax revenue.......


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I can see the megas going to automatic transmissions.

No offense to anyone, but the objective is to make the truck dummy proof. Put it in gear step on accelerator step on brake.

A computerized truck that does the shifting at optimal points will be more efficient than a driver that manually shifts as he feels like. It also eliminates clutch problems and transmission problems from improperly shifting a manual.

I would imagine for the megas their trucks are under warranty, and they're probably traded in before the warranty is up. No worries if it breaks.

I think almost all owner operators would buy a manual transmission. The guys that I have known that had automatic transmissions spent a lot of money and a lot of down time when they broke down.

If you know how to drive and it's your own truck, a manual transmission is a much cheaper, simpler alternative.

 

They have been making trucks idiot proof for years. Going back to about 1996 with the new faulting computer crap.

Instead of 60 gauges telling me how the rig is doing and keeping me up to date I get a truck with just a tach, speedo and god only knows #### all computer messages as if I am stupid and know nothing.

I want out. And actually in a twisted way, I got my wish.

 

Are you being facetious?

Obviously all the transmission problems in the world did just not appear on this web sight in the last month. If you go back several years and look you will see plenty of problems profound with automatics. You yourself, have replied to many of them.

If you have seen more comments about manual problems you have to consider that 99% of the transmissions in trucks are manuals. Over 80% of the trucks sold now have a manual. So if anything your brief survey only concluded what we already know, transmission problems are over represented by automatics.

The comment I made was in response to a comment Brandon made about the problems manual transmission had. I simply stated that automatics have those exact same problems with clutch life and gears and even more so.

 

The difference in fuel milage with a bad driver is marginal at best. You little calculus way over estimates the fuel savings. Even the folks that sell these transmission do not claim a 7% fuel savings like you calculate.

The producer's of the most refined of these transmission, Volvo, proffer something like this:

That is .65% fuel savings for the iShift over the average driver. I say even that is optimistic.

Putting that in your 250 truck fleet with more reasonable milage, fuel cost, and fuel economy figures.

[(250 trucks x 8000 miles/month )/ 6mpg x $2.50gallon ] x .65% = $5,416 saving a month for average driver with an automatic in a fleet of 250. Or $21.66 for a truck! And I say that is overly optimistic hyperbole used to sell transmission.

You will never pay the premium for the automatic transmission, let alone it's repair, at that rate.

 

The numbers don't lie. I've seen the actual historical fleet mpg numbers related to our fleet. Believe whatever you want.

The biggest improvement comparison is the 2018's that went online starting this past June. It may also be attributable to the engine but the 18's will out pull anything in the fleet. And after moving into an 18, the drivers typically showed a .5 mpg improvement over the same quarter the year before. And it's a sizeable number of trucks to compare.

About half retired '15 sticks and the other half moved from '16 autos.

 

What I have seen in fleets I have run in is:

Automatics get the the same or worse fuel milage when measured by the actual fuel they consume. Taken fuel milage from fill-ups, they are all the same milage.

Taken from the Lie-O-Lot meter in the truck, many drivers seem to be convince the automatic does better. Same with ECM dumps. However, the most optimistic ECM dumps never line up with real world fuel economy.

It is not the first time a company has skewed the data to sell a product. Just ask Volkswagen.